The Internet has grown to become a vast compilation of information accessible to user's all over the world. This has created a situation where information on almost any topic is available to people in a manner that was unthinkable not too many years ago. However, this situation gives raise to challenges; the Internet has become an information jungle, and it can be as difficult for information providers to reach their intended audience as it is for information seekers to find the information they need.
Several strategies have been introduced with the purpose of making it easier for user to find the information they seek, and to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information. One example would be search engines that attempt to index as much information as possible and develop methods for ranking information based on some strategy for measuring relevance. Another alternative is represented by various portals and directories where information is classified such that users may navigate through some hierarchical structure in order to arrive at a set of information pages that is small enough to be manageable.
Certain systems allow users to influence the information they receive by defining a user profile. The user profile can include demographic information about the user or a listing of preferred categories information the user prefers. Information presented to the user will then be selected based on the extent to which each information item fulfills the user profile according to some measurement. It has also been suggested to use the users position as determined by some positioning device carried by the user to select and present information that is considered particularly relevant to the user given the determined position.
Various methods and schemes have also been introduced in order to let information providers present their information to an intended target audience. This is often based on demographic information, to the extent such information is available, and information regarding the user's behavior, to the extent this information can be measured. Often information is simply selected and presented as additional information based on and in combination with information requested by the user.
The various methods and strategies known in the art all suffer from different forms of problems and shortcomings. One such problem is the effect that information often is assumed to be relevant because it was assumed to be relevant in the past, making it difficult for newly added information to take the place of outdated information. Another problem is that it is often difficult to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information, or between information that is relevant to a given user and information that appears relevant but only applies to users belonging to some other demographic. For information providers, one typical problem is that it is difficult to target information to an intended audience. On the Internet one user often looks much like another, with factors such as geographical location, age, interests, nationality, and other demographical identifiers being unavailable to an information provider. Often for reasons of privacy as much as for technological reasons.
No one single strategy for optimizing distribution of information can be expected to be found. Different situations requires different strategies. There is therefore clearly a need for methods and systems that will expand the available range of strategies for an information provider, and, at least on some situations, reduce or even overcome some of the problems associated with the currently available technology.